Are You Properly Using Intent Data?

October 3, 2017

Your sales and marketing departments should be constantly on the lookout for the most cutting edge revenue driving innovations. One idea that is gaining an enormous amount of traction – with good reason – is intent data.

Intent data, is at its core, a tool for marketers that closely resembles big data. Many companies found that simply collecting big data was an expensive time sink unless that data was properly interpreted and activated. Intent data takes big data one step further. Taking the big data thats been aggregated by marketers and applies a rhyme and a reason to it. Intent data data gives marketers that interpretation and activation without the complicated manual process of analysis.

The term has been on the scene long enough that a few intent data techniques have proven themselves to be quite effective. Let’s take a look at some of the best!

Intent Data as Context

Your prospects may not be converting for the reasons that you think they are. If you never find the context within which your customers choose you, your sales will have a more difficult time expanding into new markets. You will push the wrong features and benefits, drawing deaf ears where you could be mining new business.

Intent data is really good at moving past the surface level information that populated CRMs around the world. Company name, position, and time served will not get you anywhere these days. You need to know the preferred technologies of a contact, what their unofficial role in the hierarchy might be, and their history of behavior when faced with criteria relevant to your sales funnel. Intent data does this more intensely than perhaps any other current information grab or practice, and as such, is definitely something to add to your repertoire in the near future.

Without intent data, you may find yourself selling to people who exhibit the right behaviors but will never purchase. They may not have the capacity nor the propensity, and you will never know unless you drill, drill, drill.

More Personalization

The hidden secret of today’s online marketing is how to un-anonymize your prospects as soon as possible. When your prospects first visit your website, they are fairly anonymous – outside of IP tracking – but their personal character traits and motivations are still a mystery to your business. You also have very little information about the purpose they serve within their company. That person could be a decision maker or just an intern who is surfing the Internet randomly.

Web personalization serves these visitors customized content that will drive them towards actions that will identify them. The modern intent data process is not obvious or invasive. Ideally, your new prospects will feel as though they are meeting a new friend rather than putting information into a resource and time sink.

Lead Prioritization

The process of lead prioritization, essentially separating good leads from the bad, has never been easier thanks to the ever-increasing automated marketing stack marketers have at their finger tips. CRM’s email systems, ad platforms, and more can all be combined to create big data that then gives us the ability to score leads more quickly and accurately than ever before.

If you are in need of additional intent data, most automated marketing stacks allow for the introduction of third party intent data through publisher networks. These networks utilize user registration cookies of IP information to give you an even more refined and accurate picture of your user.